And while Harvey was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and hard health with every gulp of the good air, the We’re Here went her ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-gray kenches of well-pressed fish mounted higher and higher in the hold.  No one day’s work was out of common, but the average days were many and close together.

Naturally, a man of Disko’s reputation was closely watched—­“scrowged upon,” Dan called it—­by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty knack of giving them the slip through the curdling, glidy fog-banks.  Disko avoided company for two reasons.  He wished to make his own experirnents, in the first place; and in the second, he objected to the mixed gatherings of a fleet of all nations.  The bulk of them were mainly Gloucester boats, with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich, Chatham, and some of the Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows where.  Risk breeds recklessness, and when greed is added there are fine chances for every kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is huddled round some unrecognized leader.  “Let the two Jeraulds lead ’em,” said Disko.  “We’re baound to lay among ’em for a spell on the Eastern Shoals; though ef luck holds, we won’t hev to lay long.  Where we are naow, Harve, ain’t considered noways good graound.”

“Ain’t it?” said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down.  “Shouldn’t mind striking some poor ground for a change, then.”

“All the graound I want to see—­don’t want to strike her—­is Eastern Point,” said Dan.  “Say, Dad, it looks’s if we wouldn’t hev to lay more’n two weeks on the Shoals.  You’ll meet all the comp’ny you want then, Harve.  That’s the time we begin to work.  No reg’lar meals fer no one then.  ‘Mug-up when ye’re hungry, an’ sleep when ye can’t keep awake.  Good job you wasn’t picked up a month later than you was, or we’d never ha’ had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin.”

Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there.  But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her.  He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business and could even help others.  A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn—­a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant.

They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble.  “Square-rigger bellowin’ fer his latitude,” said Long Jack.  The dripping red head-sails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the ‘We’re Here’ rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand.